WE WERE HERE: Voices From the AIDS Years in San Francisco

Short Synopsis

WE WERE HERE: Voices From the AIDS Years in San Francisco will be the first deep and reflective look back at the arrival and impact of AIDS in San Francisco.

Description/Treatment

WE WERE HERE: Voices From the AIDS Years in San Francisco will be the first deep and reflective look back at the arrival and impact of AIDS in San Francisco.  Just as gay liberation was beginning to find its footing, The City and its inhabitants were faced with unprecedented calamity.

There is an appropriate moment for hindsight into a traumatic historical event. Enough time must pass to allow room for those who lived through it to catch their breath and for perspective to develop, but not so much time that memories become hazy, or the survivors die off. This is that moment for this story. According to SF AIDS educator Ed Wolf, “ there are so many choices we made in those years, so many things that we did or didn’t do that we could never have really examined in the midst of it all – couldn’t really have dealt with before now. It is time to address those things.”

It’s been almost 30 years since AIDS descended on San Francisco. Like an unrelenting hurricane, the epidemic roiled The City for two decades and only began granting some reprieve with medical advancements in the late 90s. The death years of AIDS left San Francisco ravaged and exhausted, yet, at least here, the worst seems past. Thousands are still living with HIV, and new infections continue at an alarming rate, but the relentless suffering that overwhelmed San Francisco in the 80s and 90s has given way to a kind of calm, and, understandably, a degree of willful forgetfulness.

Though the AIDS epidemic has ballooned into an ongoing international disaster, for its first decade it was perceived as primarily a disease of gay men. San Francisco’s identity as the “gay Mecca”, with its disproportionately large gay community, made its experience of the epidemic singularly concentrated and intense. 

San Francisco is filled with people who survived those years. Some are still active in AIDS work, and many continue to manage their own HIV infections on a daily basis. Others have simply moved on, doing their best to heal from and leave behind the decades of fear and pain. Yet so many people who lived through the worst of the epidemic in San Francisco express the same feeling – that no matter how awful it was, they wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else but San Francisco. What do these survivors – men and women, gay and straight, people still living with HIV and those never infected – have to say about living here through those times? What was unique to San Francisco, in the makeup of it’s citizenry, its history and its traditions that influenced the way the AIDS epidemic played out here, for better and for worse?

WE WERE HERE will tell the personal stories of some of those survivors. Intimate interviews and archival materials will serve to illuminate larger themes of the epidemic – the political and sexual complexities, the terrible emotional toll, the role of women - particularly lesbians - in caring for and fighting for their gay brothers. The film will focus on individuals who lived here prior to the epidemic, whose relationship to the City was formed in more exuberant times, and who were dragged into a terrible maelstrom that none could have anticipated.

WE WERE HERE will explore what was not so easy to discern in those early years of AIDS – the parallel histories of suffering and loss, and of community coalescence and growth. Despite legitimate fears of being forced back into the closet by AIDS, the gay community was in many ways greatly empowered by the challenges that the epidemic presented.

As a filmmaker and political activist who arrived in SF in 1976 and who was deeply impacted by the epidemic, I will bring a unique personal understanding to this history. The objectives of this film are multifold: to illuminate for younger generations – particularly young gay men – a history that is only vaguely known to them yet which has enormously impacted their lives; to open a cathartic dialogue for the generation that lived through those dark years; and to address ways in which profound lessons of the AIDS epidemic can be applicable to society in general.